For this podcast, I asked questions to Pamela Brown about the role of debt in American society and the way its very function has been historically affecting, and continues to affect the African-American community in particular. Debt should normally be understood as a mutually beneficial contract but has been transformed into yet another capitalist apparatus of profit making. It functions through an ideology of promise that ensures the conformity of life paths and the perpetuation in the future of the roles in the present society. Once the mechanisms that intertwines debt and race have been exposed, Pamela describes the work ...

The issue #12 of the In My Computer series, FDIC Insured was selected out of a call of proposals issued in 2015 by the Link Art Center and Abandon Normal Devices (AND) in the framework of Masters & Servers, and will be followed soon by the publication of the online archive of the 500+ failed banks logos collected and restored by the artist since 2008. Starting in 2008, Michael Mandiberg methodically downloaded the logos of the many banks that failed during the Great Recession, and were taken over by the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). During this process, these ...

IRL takes the form of a mood board wrapper with an interview inside. “JEQU: When artists reject the mandate to be “critical”, they sometimes do so because it is perceived to inhibit their right to sell work and participate in the market system with a clear conscience. They think they are thus defending their right to “live well.” One strategy often employed is that of the artist who spends the first part of his or her career outside of this system in order to build avant-gardist credibility, and then later chooses at a certain point to participate in the traditional market/gallery ...

Real estate history often centers on not just facts and figures but also personalities and professional networks filled with self-made characters that seem to come from fables. But what happens when real estate history’s narrative threads are pulled loose from the warp and weft of the mythologies of the cultivated professional personality? By exploring how the technical operations of financial markets function in an environment colored by personalities and social practices, we can see architecture from a perspective that accounts for the fictions of finance. This article will use three narratives about real estate developers to explain how these stories ...

This conversation with Joe Masco can be seen as the third archipelic episode of what I like to call “counter-history of the American suburbia.” After talking with Olivia Ahn about the suburban house as a gender making apparatus, and with Karen Tongson about processes of queering the suburbia, Joe and I converse about the territorial strategies at work in the creation of suburbia itself. The strategies were very much informed by both the propension of capitalism, as well as the militarized prospect of a large-scale nuclear attack. Joe explains how an imaginary of fear — similar to the one we currently ...

More significant than how spree-shooting incels kill… is how they desire. For the second New Models podcast, @LilInternet, Caroline Busta, Daniel Keller, and Masha Tian discuss the ‘supreme gentleman’ as a systemic phenomenon — one wherein society’s not-uncommon transactional model of “acquiring” women is taken to metric-obsessed and violent extremes.

New Models speaks with Z, founder of the BLACK SOCIALISTS of AMERICA (BSA), an online channel turned IRL organization providing a forum and voice for black American leftists as well as education around the values of socialism (per Marx). In this episode, we discuss the inherent racism of the “American Dream” (i.e., capitalism), the promise of worker co-ops, identity politics’ tactical deficiencies in big stack activism, and how to leverage online traction to effect real world political change.

In this conversation with Ana Džokić, we address the local politics of space and architecture in the capital city of Serbia, and former capital city of Yugoslavia, Belgrade. We use Ana’s carrier as an architect to explore the evolution of the way the city is inhabited from what she calls “wild city” at the end of the 1990s (recalling two other Archipelago conversations in Mexico City and Cairo) to the most recent capitalist development (in particular the Belgrade Waterfront project). We also questions the role of architects and its evolution in this politics, from the position of technocrat to the one that orchestrates conversation about ...

This book explores the future of critique in view of our planetary condition. How are we to intervene in contemporary constellations of finance capitalism, climate change and neoliberalism? Think we must! To get to the symptoms, the book’s 38 terms ranging from affect and affirmation to world and work provide the reader with a critical toolbox to be continued. Negativity, judgment and opposition as modes of critique have run out of steam. Critique as an attitude and a manner of enquiry has not.

What is the correlation among the creative industries, creative industry policies, new media paradigms and capitalism as colonial relations of dominance? What is the role of these industries in the prioritization of the interests of capital at the expense of those of society and how can these paradigms be criticized in the context of the actual, neoliberal, flexible regime of reproduction of capital? To what measure is this regime ‘flexible’ and to what measure it is just an extension of rigid, feudal and racial logics that underline (post)modern representational discourses? To what measure do the concepts of creativity, transparency, openness ...

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s The Californian Ideology, originally published in 1995 by Mute magazine and the nettime mailinglist, is the iconic text of the first wave of Net criticism. The internet might have fundamentally changed in the last two decades, but their demolition of the neoliberal orthodoxies of Silicon Valley remains shocking and provocative. They question the cult of the dot-com entrepreneur, challenging the theory of technological determinism and refuting the myths of American history. Denounced as the work of ‘looney lefties’ by Silicon Valley’s boosters when it first appeared, The Californian Ideology has since been vindicated by the ...

In his response to Alain Badiou’s analysis of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Nick Land detects a residue of ‘Frenchness’ in Badiou’s universalism, reconfigures the battlefield of the future, and plays devil’s advocate for globalised capitalism.

In his response to Badiou’s analysis of globalisation, subjectivity, and terror, Mark Fisher calls for a new politics to counter both the decadence of capitalist realism and the nihilistic appeal of ISIS

Badiou examines the relation between the Communist Hypothesis and the question of immigration and the ‘foreigner’, and suggests that, in order to pursue the consequences of the declaration that we share the same world, we must value identity-in-becoming over identity-as-defence.

As the CCRU’s tangled time tales emerge from obscurity, Amy Ireland digs deeper into the sorcerous cybernetics of the time spiral, acceleration, and nonhuman poetics.